Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Obama's EPA caps coal-powered electricity‏

While most were preoccupied with the Trayvon case, and the rest were listening to the Supreme Court hearings on Obamacare, the Executive branch was once again subversively flexing its muscle, via the EPA imposing the first greenhouse gas caps on power plants. Time to get ready for more brownouts and rolling blackouts?

TheWashingtonPost: The Environmental Protection Agency will issue the first limits on greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants as early as Tuesday, according to several people briefed on the proposal. The move could end the construction of conventional coal-fired facilities in the United States.

The proposed rule — years in the making and approved by the White House after months of review — will require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity produced. The average U.S. natural gas plant, which emits 800 to 850 pounds of CO2 per megawatt, meets that standard; coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt.

They forgot to mention 'behind closed doors' after "years in the making" and "months of review," as well as placing the adjective 'almighty' before the "White House." Look at how this provision narrowly targets coal-fired plants, which are the main source of electricity generation in America.

Anticipating the rule, the EPA began axing coal permits...and at least one federal judge is speaking out about it...

“EPA resorts to magical thinking” to justify nullifying permits issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for Arch Coal Inc.’s Mingo Logan mine in West Virginia, wrote U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington, D.C.

Berman Jackson said the EPA’s effort to revoke permits already issued by the Army Corps lacked the backing of any statutory provision or regulation. “It posits a scenario involving the automatic self-destruction of a written permit issued by an entirely separate federal agency after years of study and consideration,” the opinion says.

“Poof! Not only is this nonrevocation revocation logistically complicated,” the ruling said, but it also robs industry of the only way they can possibly measure compliance with the Clean Water Act — a permit.

But you see the pattern with this administration, even beyond past ones who've also participated in this destruction of industry? They hit an energy sector with some BS environmental argument, then attempt to regulate it out of existence with no backup plan, just green rhetoric attached to nonexistent alternatives, even after 40+ years of repeating the same damn thing! First they hit oil, and that lie continues to burst...

...and now they're targeting our electricity? Yep...if you decrease the production of oil and electricity, then all energy rates will indeed 'necessarily skyrocket'. Utopian motives are behind this, folks, because it's not logically thought-out policy.

ADDENDUM: And just to remind you how long the utopianism has been ruminating in that cranium, here's a 2007 piece that precedes the "necessarily skyrocket" comment in '08...